Guatemalan Presidential Election on Sunday

Guatemalan Presidential
Election on Sunday 9 September 2007

* More than a
decade after the signing of the Peace Accords that ended 30
years of brutal conflict costing 200,000 lives, violence and
shabby politics still walk hand-in-hand in Guatemala.

*
Guatemala has one of the most unequal distributions of
income in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, in the wake
of President Bush’s visit to the country in May, a new
interest in large-scale ethanol production was ignited which
is likely to lead to an even greater degree of the
concentration of wealth. Nevertheless, the main issue at
hand in the upcoming election is neither poverty alleviation
nor securing proper energy resources, but the mounting toll
of recently alleged politically-motivated assassinations of
more than 80 Guatemalans.

* The two main parties continue
to point fingers at each other, but none of their epidermal
solutions go to the root of the
problem.

Guatemala: A Nation on the
RopesSeptember brings with it the annual
commemoration of 9/11 in the United States. Although the
date represents a landmark moment, which at the same time
serves as a trigger for a random discussion of terrorism,
far fewer commentators in this country have noted that two
days earlier another important event in the modern history
of terrorism occurs—the first round of the Guatemalan
general elections.

At almost 13 million people, and the
most populous Central American nation, Guatemala is
strategically positioned in the heart of the Western
Hemisphere, with access to both the Atlantic and the
Pacific, and with a long and bitter history of unremitting
violence and human rights abuses, Guatemala will hold its
general elections in just a few days. The president,
national legislators and mayors will be facing the
electorate; no governors, senators, or state representatives
are running as Guatemala has neither an upper house nor a
state legislature, and governors are appointed by the
president. That said, the explosive fact on the docket is
that more than 80 Guatemalans, half of them political
candidates or their supporters, have been assassinated since
the injunction of the electoral campaign.

A Deadly
ToolAs Jorge Rodriguez, lawyer and former
coordinator of the Justice Pastoral, observed, “it is a
trend that, in Guatemala, the violence level increases
during the electoral periods.” Perhaps the main reason
behind these grim mathematics is that after persuading the
combatants to lay down their weapons, the 1996 Acuerdos de
Paz Firme y Duradera (Peace Accords) were supposed to mark
not only the end of 30 years of fratricidal bloodshed and
ongoing civil conflict, but also the closing down of an
industry that, until then, had been providing a blood-soaked
living for both leftist rebel death squad forces, and the
violence-prone armed forces.

It should not be forgotten
that, although the international community had been pressing
for the end of the war between the militia and leftist
forces at least since 1992, the signing of the Peace Accords
in 1996 caught many Guatemalans by surprise. In December of
that year, senior rebel officials and the armed forces met
with the Arzú administration after months of secret talks
and United Nations mediation, and what turned out to be a
shaky peace was declared. However, the low-rank fighters
largely had been left in the dark about the whole process.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the culture of
using violence for one’s livelihood developed as a prime
result of the lack of re-training opportunities and the
resultant high rates of unemployment. This came as a result
of decades of civil war, with the country not seeing the end
of the road when it came to violence. It makes eminent sense
that trained fighters, suddenly unemployed with neither the
necessary skills to be competitive in an already saturated
formal job sector, nor in the least bit interested in a
proposed land-gun exchange, would try to find new and darker
markets for their talents. In addition to the classic
strategy of working as mercenaries—increasingly under the
command of Mexican drug lords looking for a calmer place to
manage their operations, rather than in their own turbulent
nation—Guatemalan former combatants also found another
niche. This was recruiting from the streets an army of
gunslingers among the fearless and hopeless of the forgotten
youth from poor rural areas to urban slums. This can help to
explain the rapid increase in organized crime in urban
areas, and its emulation by the maras—a more sophisticated
version of urban youth gangs.

Election
TimeIn this context, the general elections have
presented themselves as a unique opportunity for those in
the business of violence to profit. In a country that lacks
a democratic experience, electoral events could generate a
topical demand for those experienced in using violence to
induce political instability, in order to achieve the
desired results at the polls. Guatemala may be experiencing
a novel era of 12 years without a military coup, but the
2007 election is already stained by a surge in
violence.

Widespread Violence aimed against urban
transportationThe assassination of more than 40
drivers in urban transportation services—many of which
were not even followed by robbery—has generated great fear
among that sector as well as apprehension among various
segments of the political class.

As the situation
worsened, on June 27th, Mario Taracena, a representative
from one of the main political parties—the moderate
leftist National Unity Hope (UNE)—delivered a denouncement
to the Ministry of Governance, Adela Camacho de Torrebiarte,
in which he accused Mark Klugmann, an experienced American
political campaign advisor, of inciting violence on behalf
of UNE’s main rival, the rightist Patriotic Party (PP).
According to Taracena, Klugman, who previously had worked on
the campaigns of Presidents Ronald Reagan (U.S.) and
Porfírio Pepe Lobo Sosa (Honduras), purportedly was behind
a campaign strategy aimed at creating political instability
in the country, through harassment of urban transportation
drivers, in order to generate chaos in the streets. It is
well-known to many in Central America that this strategy
paintedly was used in the Honduras 2005 Presidential
election that resulted in the election of Pepe Lobo.
Klugmann’s reply to his critics was laconic: “What I do
as a professional advisor has nothing to do with what an
unbalanced representative says,” and added “three
Guatemalan political parties contacted me and in one case we
reached an agreement, but it was for surveys and public
opinion research.” Whether Klugmann is working for the PP
or not is at the moment unknown, but Pepe Lobo’s old puño
duro (strong first) slogan is clearly similar to the new
mano dura (strong hand) slogan of PP’s Presidential
candidate, General Otto Pérez Molina.

The UNE and PP
parties have used the media to debate one another, turning
up the heat on the election. When it came to the drivers,
while UNE’s Álvaro Colom seconded Taracena’s claim in
saying that “the drivers’ deaths fulfill an electoral
campaign that aims to benefit a certain candidate,”
General Pérez Molina’s taut answer was that the PP was
“willing to submit itself to any investigation because we
don’t have any connection with the killings, as the UNE
has so irresponsibly denounced.” It is true that so far
the Public Ministry has not found any evidence linking the
drivers’ deaths to the PP. However, Honduran legal
assessor and wingman of President Manuel Zelaya, Enrique
Flores, raised a telling point: Whoever is actually behind
the attacks, “…one political party seems to be taking
advantage of the violence out of political motivations,
manipulating the facts in order to inspire fear in the
population and both better gain votes and manipulate the
public opinion.” With these words Flores seems to be
indicating that the PP, whose “strong hand” slogan is
presented as a “zero tolerance” solution to the
country’s increasing problem of violence, thereby links
itself to that strategy.

Targeted Violence: Death
of 40 political candidates and supportersIf it
were the murder of the drivers alone that made violence the
hot topic of the first half of the electoral campaign,
politicians themselves weren’t left out of the deadly loop
for long. The Public Ministry recently released figures
indicating that more than 40 political candidates and
campaign workers have been gunned down since the beginning
of the electoral campaign.

As Juan Luis Florido, general
inspector of the Public Ministry pointed out, it is unlikely
that all the murders had a political motivation. For
instance, the death of Edwin Saúl Martínez, a mayoral
pre-candidate for Jalpatagua, seems to have been connected
with narcotraffic activities, and the murder of Clara Luz
López, candidate for the concejal of Casillas, appears to
have been a crime of passion.

Furthermore, Colom again
pointed a finger at the PP, in general, and General Pérez
Molina, more specifically, as being responsible for at least
several of the deaths. During a meeting with the foreign
press on August 29th, Colom claimed that at least 14 of the
18 murders related to his party were committed by “members
of the mobs … associated with the Military Intelligence.
They (PP) have the support of old chiefs of the Military
Intelligence … the people responsible for the black
campaign against me.”

During the civil war the army’s
Military Intelligence allegedly was one of the prime
architects responsible for kidnappings, torture and
killings, and Otto Pérez Molina, before being elevated to
the status of general, is suspected of being involved with
such activities as a member of its staff. General Pérez
Molina’s answer was to menace Colom with legal reprimands.
In his opinion “This is an open black campaign against me
and against the PP, because the UNE is desperate now that
they have realized that they are going to lose the
elections.”

Coming from a militant or gang background
the suspicion that political parties were hiring hit men in
order to intimidate both prospective voters as well as
targeting candidates has been enough to establish quite a
chaotic situation with less than a week to go before the
election. The members of the Electoral Supreme Court were
unanimous in demanding that the parties’ maintain a
campaign free of violence and verbal attacks, but its
president, Óscar Bolaños, went even farther. In the last
meeting with the political parties electoral observers on
Wednesday, he stated: “I don’t see an atmosphere for
elections. In a democratic system we all should be aware
that this isn’t a matter of winning or losing, but of
having a vision of what is the best for Guatemala.” Just
three days after Bolaños’ appeal, two more political
figures were killed.

ENDS

The Council on Hemispheric
Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit,
non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information
organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as
being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of
scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please
see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington
offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202)
223-4979

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